Several long minutes later, I was alone with Kürten. I lifted him back to his feet. He passed a hand through his hair and checked the knot in his neck tie.
'You look fine,' I said. I wanted to slap him.
'Do you think there are any press photographers out there?'
'You looking to create a police brutality situation here? Cause that's the way we're headed.'
He cocked an eyebrow at me. I was grimacing with the pain in my gut; I tried to get my face under control while I dragged him along and kicked open the door, waving the scrap of white gown with my free hand. The clouds had parted while I'd been inside and the sun shone in my eyes.
A burst of submachine gun fire drove bullets into the stonework around the church door. I pulled Kürten to the ground with me. Something dug into my face, tore my cheek. Ritter shouted at the
Schupo
to hold fire and stiff leather soles double-timed it across the square.
They hauled me upright and cuffed my hands behind my back.
Ritter squared up to me, buck-toothed grin more pronounced than ever. His blue eyes squinted in the sun and he'd picked up some grey in his black hair since I'd seen him last, but he was still thin. It also looked like he was trying to grow a moustache – to cover those teeth? – though the limp fur blooming in patches over his top lip didn't seem to want to play along. His grin worried me and so did what he was carrying in his left hand. My satchel.
'Bucky,' I said with a nod – his nickname back when we'd been partners.
'Thomas,' he nodded back – studied formality, the only kind he could do.
'Was that wise, shooting at Kürten?' I said.
'What makes you think they were aiming for him?' Ritter said. He smashed his fist into my nose and the cartilage gave out.
They drove us to Mühlenstrasse HQ, took my belt, shoes, wallet and watch and threw me in a holding cell. The door clanged shut, shaking clumps of mould from the brick walls. I kicked a brown-stained bucket into the middle of the room. It swayed from side to side as I slumped on the hard wooden bunk lining one wall, rumpling the thin blanket beneath my buttocks.
This beef between Ritter and me, it was personal. Probably I shouldn't have slept with his wife, but she'd been the one who came on to me, after all. My mistake: Ritter had kept me off the murder commission despite my record and made sure I was kept in exile in a suburban police precinct at the
arsch
-end of nowhere. Meanwhile his Ripper investigation had achieved nothing in over a year. So yes, I'd wanted the collar. I'd wanted the glory. I'd wanted to rub Ritter's nose in his failure and prove to everyone else how full of shit he was. Was that so bad?
Well, perhaps it was. Give it some time and Ritter would send for me and then I would find out what form his revenge was going to take this time. But I couldn't forget that there was a lost five-year-old girl out there, maybe dead, maybe dying for lack of food or water or medical attention. We needed to find her, and soon.
I hoped that while Ritter was leaving me to stew he was sweating Kürten for all the information he could. I wasn't going to get anywhere by worrying though, and I needed sleep, so I took off my jacket and rolled it up. I placed this makeshift pillow at the furthest end of the bunk from the door and I lay on my side.
Warm sunlight blared in through a high barred window. My mind buzzed with the events of the day. My nose throbbed and my nostrils had filled with dried blood, making it hard to breathe. I tried sniffing hard a couple of times, but that dislodged the crusts that had formed and caused fresh blood to flow. Settling on my back made the blood drip down my throat so I went back to lying on my side and breathing through my mouth.
Later, a banging noise dragged me awake. I raised my head from my rolled-up jacket. It was still light outside, but only just. The sky through the bars was a deep blue. The wound in my cheek throbbed now, worse than my nose, and my head was pounding too. My mouth was dry and a sticky white residue clung to my lips.
A metallic rasp came from the corridor outside my cell.
'Hello?' I called out. Nobody answered. The hatch in the thick cell door was open.
I got off the bunk and staggered to the door. I gazed through the hatch. Darkness gazed back. I crept closer. Were those whispering voices I could hear out there? I put my eye as close to the hatch as I dared, trying to make out any movement beyond.
Just then, the light in my cell died and cool liquid splashed my face. I pressed my lips together before any of it got in my mouth: I hoped it was water but I wasn't up for taking any risks. I backed off, stumbled and fell, cracking my hip against the side of the bunk. I felt around for the blanket. My fingers found it and I used it to wipe my face. Laughter leaked through from the corridor. I wanted to go back and bang on that door, all night if need be, shout and scream and call them names. But that was what they wanted.
I settled back against the bunk. I counted silently and my breathing deepened. The pain in my head lost some of its intensity. Some time after that sleep found me again.
Banging, outside the cell door. The metallic rasp from my troubled dreams back to pull me awake. This was classic stuff to deprive me of sleep ahead of my upcoming interrogation. I opened my eyes as the cell light came on. I was ready for it this time; I'd fallen asleep with the blanket twisted around my head. I blinked until I could bear more of the light, then I cast off the blanket.
The door opened. Two
Schupo
men pulled me out of the cell and carried me up several flights of stairs. I lost count of how many floors we went up, but I recognised the second floor offices from when I'd worked at HQ, back when Ritter and I had been partners. The
Schupo
led me down a hallway painted in two-tone institutional grey. They locked me into an interview room which had the unremarkable look of interview rooms everywhere, consisting as it did of two cheap wooden chairs arranged either side of a chipped wooden card table.
I took the chair facing the door. It creaked under me, so I moved and took the one opposite. That creaked too, only this time I couldn't summon the energy to move again. The table wobbled when I leaned my elbows on it. Damn it, was that just wear and tear or had they shortened one of the legs on purpose? A breeze pushed its way through the open window and I shivered. This window was large, maybe four times the size of the one in my cell downstairs, but the bars outside were just as thick.
Ha, listen to me. My cell. They'd got me thinking I belonged there already. The thought made me laugh aloud. The ragged quality of the laughter made me laugh all the more until there were tears of pain dripping off my chin. I caught some of the tears on my tongue but the salty tang only increased my thirst. My stomach muscles ached like I'd just done a hundred sit-ups: tension, pure and simple, tightening me up. Even though I was familiar with this interrogation technique, it was starting to work. I'd have to watch that: maybe Ritter was going to go the whole hog and try for a charge of withholding evidence. He probably had enough on me for that.
The door opened. I resisted turning round to look. The door shut again. I thought whoever it was had left, as I didn't hear any footsteps. But then a man in plain clothes came into my line of sight and sat in the chair at the opposite side of the table. He'd left his jacket in another room, waistcoat hanging loose over a solid gut, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow exposing a red and green tattoo on his left forearm. He had unruly blond hair and a red patch along the left side of his jaw that looked to be a shaving rash. I didn't recognise him and he didn't introduce himself.
He took a cigarette from a silver case and lit it. He offered the case to me.
'Why am I here?' I said.
No response.
'Look, there's a five-year-old girl out there, missing, maybe dead. We don't have time to play Ritter's games.'
He just waved the case under my nose, the clown. Clearly, I would have to wait for the ringmaster.
'You don't have a cigar?' I said.
He scratched the side of his flat nose and shook his head. I took one of the little white tubes and he lit it for me. I gulped down as much smoke as it took to make my vision dance with purple and white lights. On the exhale the damn thing tasted of nothing.
'Can I have some water?' I croaked. 'Maybe something to eat?'
He looked me up and down and thought things over for a while before he said, 'I'll see what I can do.' He wasn't from the city. Not from Cologne either, though I couldn't place the accent.
He paused with his hand on the door knob as though unsure whether to say what was on his mind.
He went with: 'And I do read the papers, you know.'
Having thus informed me that he knew all about Gertrude Albermann, and that he cared just as much as I did, he left the room. I smoked my cigarette. I tried to take my time over it but it was all I had to occupy me and it was gone before I knew it.
This time when the door opened I did turn around. Ritter stood smirking at me with his buck teeth, his arms full of items bearing evidence tags.
'Has Kürten said anything about the Albermann girl?' I said.
Ritter came and sat down. The overhead light lengthened the bags under his eyes and lightened the blue of his irises. It also made his top lip twinkle. I couldn't stop looking at his moustache. He noticed me looking, pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. He took his time wiping it. There was a lot of silver in his five o'clock shadow.
The blond detective had followed him in and now stood in the corner by the window. His arms, I noticed, were empty. I hadn't expected him to bring me anything – it made more sense to make that conditional on the answers they wanted me to give – but that didn't do much to dampen my disappointment. My mouth felt drier than ever, to the point where I doubted I'd be able to talk for long. The plaster behind the blond detective was crumbling and spotted with black marks. More mould. Seemed like someone had blown the building's maintenance budget on the horses.
On the table Ritter laid out two plain brown envelopes, my notebook, and Kürten's bloody scissors. I didn't bother to read the labels on the envelopes. I knew what they would say.
'So how long exactly were you intending to hang on to this evidence before you recorded it and handed it in?' Ritter said.
'How long are you intending to torture me before you charge me or let me go?'
Ritter rubbed at the corner of his right eye and flicked the results in the direction of the window. He leaned back in the chair and put his feet up on the table. It wobbled and he put his arms out to steady himself like some tightrope walker. Guess that meant the short leg wasn't deliberate.
'You know that the possible political nature of your crime outweighs all other considerations,' he said.
So that's how he wanted to play this: the political angle. I looked at his moustache again to try and throw him off. He took his feet off the table, sat up straight and blew his nose on the same handkerchief. Again he took his time with the wiping.
'Look, Ritter, we can't spend all night playing silly buggers while a child is out there somewhere needing our help.'
He stared me into silence. 'You talk to me about playing silly buggers, Tommy-Boy? You? After all this?' He indicated the items on the table with a sweep of his hand.
'Just tell me. Do we know where she is? Whether she's alive? Did he say anything to confirm that he's the Ripper?'
'You finished?'
'She could be dying out there while you sit here getting your stupid goddamned revenge on me!'
'Finished?' He was smiling, the bastard. Well, let him. If Albermann died because of his time wasting, I'd make him pay.
Meanwhile, I was going to have to play along, so I sat back. 'What are you going to charge me with?'
Ritter watched the blond detective take notes. He chuckled. 'We'll start with obstruction. But that depends on your ongoing links with the Red Front.'
The old blame-the-leftists game. Never mind being a mass murderer or child abductor, if you really wanted a hard time in this town you had to join the Communist Party. Or, as in my case, just be suspected of having done so. I hated the goddamned Commies, but that hadn't stopped Ritter pretending I was one of them.
'I have no links with the Red Front,' I said. 'Never did.'
'Well what about your friend at the
Volksstimme
propaganda sheet?'
'It's a newspaper.'
'A Commie newspaper. Sounds like one of those paradigms, right Vogel?'
'Paradoxes,' Blondie – Vogel – said. That made me warm to him a little. Anyone who challenged Ritter was worth the benefit of the doubt.
'Why don't we split the difference and call it a contradiction?' I said, which got me a smile from Vogel.
'No one likes a smartarse, Thomas,' Ritter said. 'Specially not a Marxist smartarse.'
'That
Volksstimme
reporter was one of my noses, a casual informant, as well you know. The rest was trumped up charges invented by you.'
He spoke over me: 'You're accusing me of making false accusations? In front of a brother officer?' He nodded back at Vogel, who scribbled on his pad. 'What possible reasons could I have for doing such a thing?'